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Food Glorious Food: From A Website To Your Door

Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co. is one of many food purveyors that ship through Goldbely.com

Goldbely CEO Joe Ariel freely admits that his company is an agent of food pornography. Just visiting its site, one is overwhelmed with images of glistening meats, sparkling fruit pies and flaky pastry. It’s all just a tease, though, until you order from one of Goldbely’s food-purveyor clients.

Teaming up with local restaurants and food sources throughout the country, the company acts as a platform for consumers to find everything from Texas barbecued sausages and Florida Key Lime pie, to Alaskan Salmon and New York pastrami. They then order through the Goldbely website and receive their food – packed for travel – up to a few days later. Kind of like Etsy for grub. Its traction has been compelling.

The six-month-old company emerged from accelerator-incubator Y Combinator this past spring and has since seen a whole lot of growth in a small amount of time. Last month Goldbely broke the $100,000 per month sales barrier, after having almost doubled its numbers each month since launch and has reached break-even status. “Nowadays people really care more and more about what they’re eating,” says Ariel. “At the end of the day what we’re doing is we’re connecting the greatest local purveyors with a national audience.”

Goldbely doesn’t take on just any food source, though. The company has to approve of the taste, the purveyor should have an interesting back-story with a history of well-received food, the products must travel well and make a good gift. Gifting has been big so far, with customers ordering corporate gifts, foods for Father’s day, birthdays or other events. “From a gifting perspective, we feel like it is the best gift that anyone can get,” says Ariel.

Notable restaurants that have teamed up with Goldbely include New York’s famous Katz’s Deli, Louisiana’s La Boucherie (inventor of the infamous Turducken) and Texas’s BBQ gem, Kreuz Market. The company gets a cut of sales, priced as if it was buying at wholesale price and selling at retail. Growth among customers has been mostly organic word of mouth, says Ariel, but it’s possible that advertising will be part of Goldbely’s strategy in the future.

On the competition front, Omaha Steaks’ $500 million in annual sales, 1-800 Flowers and Harry & David’s food gifting businesses are tough to go head to head with. But that is not Goldbely’s plan. The space is so large that competing with those three big players is not a zero-sum game and the company’s partners offer various cuisines.

“Those guys account for about $1 billion in revenue,” Ariel explained. “The food gifting market is about a $11 billion market so the other 90% are these other small and medium mom and pop shops all across the country who don’t have the great infrastructure as far as technology, as far as building a website as far as marketing online.”

If you know pastrami, you know New York's Katz's Deli.

The company is in the midst of closing a large seed round of funding and Ariel is tight-lipped about how much (Goldbely raised over $300,000 in the past six months from angels and through Y Combinator). “What we’re going to do now is going to be quite a bit larger,” said Ariel.

The future of the space is in specialty foods, he explained, and if Goldbely can be the brand that consumers look to in that category it could optimistically be a billion dollar business.

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